Two aspects of fundamental importance in the packaging industry are the optimization of the space occupied by the products to be packed, namely the minimization of the empty spaces inside the container in which such products are arranged or the maximization of the density of the products inside the container, as well as the speed of the packing process.
A plurality of possible arrangements for the optimization of the space, such as the arrangement which provides for five or six tetrahedral products arranged side by side with their opposing faces being adjacent so as to form, in plan, a pentagon or a hexagon, are known with particular reference to the packing of elements having a substantially tetrahedral shape.
In a process for obtaining the desired positioning, tetrahedral products are arranged by hand inside the container. A drawback of this known process lies in the fact that the process cannot proceed at a high speed, as instead would be desirable, due to the bottleneck consisting of the slow manual filling of the containers.
An alternative process involves the use of known automatic machines that, in order to speed up the filling times of the containers, use a robotic arm that grasps a single tetrahedral product at a time and arranges it inside the container in a pseudo-random manner. This known machine also comprises two parallel conveyor belts, fed with opposite directions, which respectively transport the tetrahedral products and the containers in which these products are placed. A camera system is used as a control system to locate the position of each tetrahedral product present in bulk on the relevant conveyor belt, so as to suitably move the robotic arm. A drawback of this machine lies in the high complexity of the control system of the robotic arm, as well as in the relatively low speed of filling.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,396,507 A describes a machine in which the tetrahedral products are accumulated with a fan-shaped arrangement at the end of a conveyor belt to be grasped by handling means to be arranged in a container in a radial manner, with consequent limits in the optimization of the space filled by the tetrahedral products in the container.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,618,758 A discloses a container containing tetrahedral products that are arranged along a row with the lower faces arranged on a same plane and with an orientation opposite with respect to the previous tetrahedral product.